Columbia University

Secular and Spiritual America

RELIW4805
Spring 2013
Professor Courtney Bender

Riley B. Kellogg
646-413-3749
rbk2128@columbia.edu
rileybk@gmail.com

Thomas Edison's Apparatus for Talking with the Dead

Imagining Spiritual Technologies in America

EDISON ANNOUNCES A NEW APPARATUS

In the year 1920, Thomas Alva Edison announced that he was at work on a telephonic
device to enable communication with non-corporeal realms or dimensions. The American
public was intensely engaged, and promptly adopted a name for this incipient technology:
the Spirit Phone.1 The announcement came in an oblique way, almost off-hand in answer
to questions posed to him at a luncheon honoring him on his seventy-third birthday.2 The
press was quick to pick upand embellishthe story. Newspapers and magazines
published interviews and articles: Scientific American,3 Cosmopolitan, American Magazine,
Mechanix Magazine,4 and others got in on the action. Edison's announcement declared that
he would journey into a realm where some had hoped he would go when earlier
communications technologies were introduced. Edison had apparently already given serious
attention to the theoretical possibilities of such a device, and he continued for some time to
theorize and experiment. But while he spent a great deal of time on developing the
apparatus, no prototype was produced by his laboratoryor, at least, none was offered to the
public. Other inventors had similar ideas, or were quick to jump on the bandwagon that was
created by Edison's announcement; several other Spirit Phones were introduced to the
press. None, however, went into actual manufacture and distribution.
1 Fabris, Gerard, 1998. Mr. Edison's Machine to Talk with the Dead: Spiritualism, Technology and
Imagination in the Post-World War I United States. Unpublished paper, Columbia University. p. 2.
2 New-York Tribune. (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, February 12, 1920. Edison at 73 is the Center of
Reunion.
3 Lescarboura, Austin C. Scientific American October 30, 1920. Edison's Views on Life and Death: An
Interview with the Famous Inventor Regarding His Attempt to Communicate with the Next World.
4 Edison's Own Secret Sprit Experiments. Modern Mechanix and Inventions, October, 1933. Accessed at
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/edisons-own-secret-spirit-experiments/
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Some skeptical observers have speculated that in announcing this apparatus, Edison was
pulling the collective leg of the American people and of all Spiritualists and their
sympathizers on both sides of the Atlantic; that he intended his apparatus as a hoax, a selfdebunking technique for the edification and disenchantment of the public. A strong case can
be made, however, that Edison seriously believed in the possibility of successfully
constructing this apparatus for communication with the dead. I will proceed by taking the
position (which I believe is the stronger) that Edison's philosophy was sincerely held, and
that his stated hopes for the realization of the apparatus were genuine. Edison made many
statements, both to the press and in his journals, concerning religion, the spiritual,
Spiritualism, and his philosophical understanding of the nature of life. Together, these can
provide some illumination as to his intent in pursuing the project.
This paper will touch upon questions that surround Edison's development of the
apparatus for speaking with the dead: What made the place and time right for this
announcement to be greeted with such optimistic enthusiasm? How did Edison's public
imagine the relationships among life, death, religion, spirituality, and technology? And what
was the societal and cultural setting that would lead a man of empiricism and objectivistmaterialist views to contemplate and pursue such an apparatus? These questions will provide
a context for the main issues the paper will address. The focus will be on Edison's material
conception of the personality, and his questions of its possible persistence after the death of
the gross body in which the personality abides during the human life span. I hope to explore
the ways in which this conception reformulates and rephrases questions surrounding the
mind-body and spirit-matter binaries that have been so central to various philosophical and
theological debates throughout history. I will also ask how, looking through the eyes of
Edison and his contemporaries, these conceptions and questions can suggest how they
themselves saw the relationship between the technical and the spiritual in the inventions of
their era, how our views have come to be as they are, and different ways we might approach
these questions. It is possible that we may have been missing some of the concerns working
as motive forces in the development of mechanical-technical devices. Perhaps by examining
the history of their reception, we may gain a greater understanding not only of our
perceptions and uses of them, but of our own inventive imaginations as well.
SETTING THE STAGE: A century of unsettling innovation
Let's look at the setting for Edison's life as an inventor, and for his startling
announcement of 1920. The pace of change, both technological and societal, had quickened
drastically during the long nineteenth century; old certainties were challenged and cut down;
fear and hope for the future competed for the hearts and minds of the modern world. The
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Civil War in America took a great toll, both in practical terms of destruction and change, and
in emotional terms, unsettling the known and understood forms and functioning of society.
Loss of life on a scale greater than had been known for generations contributed to the sense
of rudderlessness. Mourning, and a yearning for those loved and lost, was felt on a societal
and national level, not only on an individual and family one. In this setting Spiritualism
flourished, holding out the possibility of regaining contact with the dead. The Great
Awakening exemplified a trend toward individualistic seeking for spiritual experience and
conviction, as confidence in established, traditional forms of religion eroded. The Great War,
followed by the global influenza epidemic, intensified the sense of loss and uncertainty
about the future. On the technological scene, inventions in the realm of communications
and, more specifically, in the transmission and storage of facsimiles of sensory datasight
and soundwere transgressing the boundaries of believability.
Imagine the impact on someone who could have lived through all of these: someone
born in 1820 would have seen the invention of the photograph at age six, of electricity to
power industry at seventeen, and the telegraph at eighteen; would have fought in or
witnessed the Civil War at age forty-one, witnessing a huge loss of life;5 seen the telephone
at fifty-six, and electric incandescent lighting at 58; the kinetoscope at seventy-one; radio at
seventy-five; projected motion pictures at seventy-six. If they lived long enough, they would
have seen the Great War at age ninety-four,6 and the influenza epidemic7 at age ninety-eight.
Rare as is must have been for an individual to personally live through all of these, everyone
born during that hundred years would have experienced many if not most of these profound
changes. The wars and epidemic served to unsettle much further the sense of the world
being a predictable and sensible place. The pace of life continued to quicken with
developments in transportation, including the introduction of flight, and further rapid
improvements in communications technologies.
Many of these technologies are ones that make invisible forces visible, intangible
presences tangible. The world through this era was coming to feel both increasingly
governed by scientific principles that could be understood by humans, and at the same time
increasingly full of astonishing wonders. Developments in science far outpaced the average
person's ability to comprehend its products. Electrical technology especially was the
beginning of the black box: you really don't understand how it works but it does these
5 Estimates of fatalities in the Civil War range from approximately 2% of the entire U.S. population to far
higher; at least 10% of the white males of military age in the North and 20% in the South; enough for a
demographic shift and accompanying psychological impact.
6 Sixteen and a half million dead worldwide; 1.75% of the world's population.
7 Between twenty and forty million lives lost worldwide. In the USA, 28% of the population was infected,
and 675,000 died; that's ten times more than were killed in the Great War. http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/
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wondrous things commented Paul Israel, an historian at the Edison Papers Project at
Rutgers University.8
As Susan J. Douglas observes of this era,
As the society navigated, and sometimes drifted, toward new horizons,
heroes served as fixed points during an uncharted voyage. White and
black images of good and evil stood out againstand helped make sense
ofthe complicated and subtle processes of industrialization,
urbanization, and centralization which began accelerating in the 1870s.
America's ability to cope with great complexity has been accompanied,
and probably strengthened, by a reassuring simplicity in idea and symbol.9
The inventor in the late nineteenth century was a new kind of culture hero; one who
partook of the legacy of the Rugged Individualist model, but with a decidedly modern twist.
Technological innovators such as Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Guglielmo
Marconi, and Nikola Tesla were unlike earlier heroes. Such inventors personified the
prevalent belief in ever greater social progress through technology.10 The inventor was, in
America perhaps even more than elsewhere, the new embodiment of the ideal of the
explorer, a person who uses the principles of modern science to master the unknown not
geographically but intellectually, and improve the lives of society through his discoveries.
Thomas Alva Edison was by far the most prolific inventor America had seen11, and
arguably remains the most influential. The electric light bulb, systems for the storage of
electricity and its delivery safely into homes, the phonograph, the motion picture: each of
these inventions not only completely altered the texture of daily life but expanded its
possibilities in more ways than we are likely aware . He was a pioneer in the manufacture
and marketing of his inventions, and in the management of his work force. Almost entirely
self-educated, he was a model of the self-made man. Edison was the Inventor-Hero par
excellence, and exemplified the man of reason and science to the public of his era.
The inventor-heroand, in particular, the electrical inventor-herowas a new societal
role that was in some ways reminiscent of the shaman-priest model. The inventor confronted
unknown forces and powers, taming them for the comfort, safety, or prosperity of the
society, and enchanted the senses in bringing new developments to everyday living. This
8

PBS History Detectives: Psychophone http://video.pbs.org/video/1143720703/ segment 1with Gwendolyn

Wright, Historian.
9 Douglas, Susan J. Inventing American broadcasting, 1899-1922. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1989, p. 3. Cited in Fabris, p. 3.
10 Fabris 1998, p. 3.
11 As measured by number of patents issued. His record of 1093 was not surpassed until the year 2003.
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wave was different from the improvements that the inventions of the Industrial Revolution
had brought, which for many led most noticeably to drudgery being performed with more
efficiency. The boom in electrical and communications invention brought light, music,
movement, laughter into daily life. These inventions addressed not only the practical tasks of
life and progress in production, but the imaginations and dreams of the population. Even
Edison's nickname, the Wizard of Menlo Park (referring to the location of his research
facility in New Jersey), hints at this sense of magic, and the enchantment of the public's
perception of the technological progress of the age.
In tandem with technological and large-scale social changes came changes on the
American spiritual scene as well. Traditional forms of religiosity were transforming.
Church-centered religions were supplemented by a more anarchic trend of individuals
seeking their own pathways to what they felt was a more direct and authentic contact with
spiritual realities and realms. The strong current of Spiritualism and individual spiritual
seeking might appear to have run alongside the very different stream of industrial and
scientific development in technology and mechanization, seemingly like two rivers of oil
and water, rushing along the same social river bed but mixing uneasily when mixing at all.
This is how the two streams look from the vantage point of the present day; but at the time
the division between spirituality and science was not nearly so clear.
The Spiritualist movement had grown rapidly from its beginnings 1848. The practice
clearly touched something in the public's collective psyche; by the end of the Civil War,
some ten million people in America and Europe were engaging in seances or other
Spiritualist pursuits. The sensory and material nature of Spiritualist practicessounds that
could be heard by observers as well as participants in the sance, the movement of objects,
apparently caused by spiritsallowed for public witness and verification, in a way that the
private revelatory experiences of self-identified mystics did not. This was a form of religious
practice that had a substance other than faith; the objects of belief were theoretically open to
proof. Experiments by many researchers including William James seemed to some observers
to provide scientific verification of the validity of practitioners' claims. In this age of
increasing reliance on scientific verification to determine truth, Spiritualism's material aspect
put it, in the eyes of many of its followers, on the firm footing of materially-substantiated,
objective reality. A number of prominent scientific thinkers and other intellectuals who
investigated and lent varying degrees of support to Spiritualism and its offshoots added to
this perception in some quarters. Alexander Graham Bell was an unabashed believer in
spiritualism, attending seances and writing speculative essays on the future of congress with
the dead; Marie Curie attended seances regularly and believed that there was spiritual
significance in X-rays. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a medical doctor and creator of the paragon
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of cold, rational, logical thought, Sherlock Holmes, was also the most outspoken supporter
of communication with the dead, and a prolific writer on the subject. William James studied
mediums and worked closely with the Society for Psychic Research.
INTRODUCING UNCANNY INVENTIONS
Reading reactions of educated people to the technologies developing through this period
in light of the general experience of the time gives a startling picture of how it must have felt
to be confronted by such radical innovation. In 1878, the newly-invented phonograph was
demonstrated in many cities. Not surprisingly, local newspapers took a keen interest. After
giving a brief explanation of how the phonograph works, one journalist wrote that
many are skeptic and say to the scientific expositor, 'Let me see you
shake a piece of iron until it talks!' The wise ones shake their heads, look
and listen a while and and [sic] say, 'It must be so.' Then they are asked
why should the sheet of iron talk, and this, like a hard conundrum, they are
forced to 'give up.' Again we say every one should see and examine
personally.12
While the wise ones could not understand how it worked, they understood that it had
been made to work through human understanding of natural processes, and was thus
vouched for scientifically. In other words, they took it on faithfaith in the scientific
method.
A United States Congressman, S.S. Cox, responded to the news and demonstrations of
the phonograph in a lecture published in a Washington, D.C. Newspaper in 1878: Suppose
some [explorer], in prowling among the tombs of Greece or Cyprus, should find not merely
the manuscript, but the embalmed eloquence of Demosthenes ... and should, by a turn of the
crank, let us have it in very tone and truth, it would be accounted marvellous [sic], but it is
simple compared to other phenomena now, all too familiar to be marvellous [sic]. If soon
one's words may be made into lightning and then transformed back into audible words, why
may not the dead speak to the living?13 Apparently, the ability to speak from beyond the
grave through a material recording made when one was alive was considered just as
improbable and uncanny as the ability to speak from beyond the grave through the volition
of a spirit that survived death. And thus the latter seemed to Mr. Cox an inevitable corollary
12 Explaining the phonograph. (1878, Jun 26). The Daily Constitution (1876-1881). Retrieved from
http://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/494690707?
accountid=10226
13 Cox, S.S., The Poetry of the Phonograph, The Post and Union newspaper, Washington, D.C., April 24,
1878.
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of the formera very odd leap in understanding and expectation from our current
perspective, though perhaps understandable from the perspective of the time. The telegraph
and telephone produce contact with those so distant as to be otherwise invisible and
impossible to hear. What these technologies accomplished seemed an occult manifestation to
many minds of the day. Those more open to their marvels thought that perhaps these
technologies would also produce devices that could effect contact with those who are even
further removed from our physical and visual presence: the spirits of the dead.
The permeation of Spiritualism into the cultural fabric during this era gives further
context for this association of ideas. While embraced by only a minority of the country,
acquaintance with the concepts involved in Spiritualism was widespread, even if often
unclear. The principle was that entities from a spiritual, non-corporeal realm could and did
communicate with living persons, and did so usually through a medium, without making
themselves visible. They did so through sound, and by physically affecting material objects,
which were observed to fly through the air, or seemingly to materialize out of nowhere.
Mediums, persons with particular sensitivities to the communications or vibrations of the
spirit realm, received and transmitted the intangible voices of the non-corporeal spirits, or
facilitated their active presence. The development of the phonograph, a mechanical receiver,
amplifier, and recorder of the voices of the living, was a man-made parallel to the humanspiritual technology of the medium.
Many believed that the spirits of those who had once been living humans were out
there, awaiting the means by which to convey messages they yearned to communicate to
living humans. And not only the spirits of deceased humans, but also other non-corporeal
entities or spirits awaited their reception. Why not imagine that their messages could be
picked up by a new kind of phonograph or telephone, by a non-human receiver / medium?
All that was needed was the person who could envision and construct this new apparatus, as
had been done for the invisible forces tapped by the telegraph, the telephone, the
phonograph, and film. Edison's announcement came at the most opportune time. At the
luncheon given for his seventy-third birthday, the New-York Tribune reported that Edison
was ruminating over new marvels that he promises will be as astonishing to this generation
as his talking machine was to that which thought the idea was a fantastic dream.14
In discussing the genesis of his inventions, Edison described how one development led
him to the next: The phonograph first suggested the motion picture camera. I had been
working for several years on my experiments for recording and reproducing sounds, and the
14 New-York Tribune. (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, February 12, 1920. Edison at 73 is the Center of
Reunion.
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thought occurred to me that it should be possible to devise an apparatus to do for the eye
what the phonograph was designed to do for the ear.15 And apparently he eventually came
to think that the same could be done for the personality.
INTERPRETING THE APPARATUS AND ITS PURPOSE
As an inventor and manufacturer, Edison was highly practical: that is, he would
sometimes put ideas on the back burner or abandon them entirely if he felt that they could
not attract investors and consumers. He was a strategic thinker in this way.16 He is quoted by
Martin Andr Rosanoff as declaring that An invention is no good unless it's commercial
and people are willing to pay for it.17 And it seems certain that this apparatus would have
been commercially successful if it had come to fruition. But Edison often noted that a great
deal of unsuccessful experimentation and investigation was a necessary part of the process
of invention. He attempted many devices that did not pay off. Edison was a scientific
explorer who discovered new continents where prevailing opinion held that none existed. If
sometimes he sailed off the edge of the world, that was part of the risk of exploration.18
The skeptics, materialist-objectivist thinkers who felt that Edison was having a big laugh
over a practical joke on the American people, or at least on the gullible, and on the
Spiritualists (these two groups being conflated by some of the commenters) voiced
strenuous objections to the sincerity of this project. They said that Edison, being a scientist,
would not have been involved in research into spiritual matters in earnest. These objections
seem to be reactions to a misunderstanding of the research, or simply to the name spirit
phone, although this was not how Edison himself referred to the device. Edison took care to
distance himself from psychic researchers and Spiritualism on many occasions; he ridiculed
the notion that his apparatus could be used as a medium on which to call up spirits at will.
There seems to be a parallel to Edison's apparatus in the earlier work of William
Frederick Pinchbeck. This eighteenth-century self-described mechanic and philosopher
was also a showman. More than a century before Edison announced his apparatus,
Pinchbeck produced and exhibited an Acoustic Temple. This elaborate contraption listened,
15 Edison, Thomas Alva. The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison. Dagobert D. Runes, ed.
New York: Philosophical Library, 1948, p. 70.
16 He did make some large tactical blunders in protecting certain ideas, or expecting more funding and sales
than they foundsuch as neglecting to patent the kinetoscope in England, and remaining the only US
marketer of a phonograph that did not incorporate radio, when that became an option. Mistakes
notwithstanding, his planning and choices were in the main along tactical lines.
17 Rosanoff, Martin Andr. Harper's Monthly, September 1932. Edison in his laboratory, p 414415.
http://harpers.org/archive/1932/09/edison-in-his-laboratory/
18 Conot, Robert. Streak of Luck. 1979. New York: Seaview Books. Chapter 39: The Freethinker. p. 471.
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through a construction of tubes and trumpets, to whispered questions, and a disembodied

oracular female voice gave answers. But Pinchbeck's purpose in exhibiting the Acoustic
Temple was not to provide spiritual consultation or mystical experience, nor to deceive a
gullible public into believing they were receiving such things. As Lee Eric Schmidt writes in
Hearing Things, Pinchbeck's Acoustic Temple was presented as a performance that evoked
the magical in order to dispel that very enchantment.19
The Acoustic Temple beckoned natural philosophers and amateurs of science
everyone dedicated to the advance of learning and inventionto a performance of the
enlightenment, a vanquishing of superstition and priestcraft. As one 1805 broadside
proclaimed, 'Attend, and never after give credit to the improbable tales of Witchcraft and
Supernatural Agency.20 Where Pinchbeck had the technologies of the speaking trumpet
with which to work his edifying illusion, Edison had the richer tool kit of telegraph, radio,
recording phonograph, and telephone. Schmidt writes that Pinchbeck was a part of the scene
of expanding knowledge of acoustical technologies and performative politics that was
providing the learned with the mechanisms by which a distrust of disembodied voices
could be manufactured.21
Still, Pinchbeck's ambitious program of disenchanting the ear was never completed. How
curious that less than a half-century after Pinchbeck sought to discredit the evidence
presented by disembodied sound, the Fox sisters ushered in a new wave of fascination and
practice directed at precisely those disembodied voices, promoted by devoted mediums and
other practitioners as genuine conduits for communication with non-corporeal entities. And
far more uncanny performances of dis-embodied sounds than Pinchbeck's, through recording
technologies, have continued through Edison's day and into our own, and are now so
commonplace as to be completely unremarked; though they are no less remarkable, when
one thinks about it.22
EDISON'S VISION: TECHNOLOGY IN SOCIAL CONTEXT
Edison seems to have been unequivocally earnest about his desire for the betterment of
the human condition and, particularly, American life and society. He held that one way to
19 Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 78-80.
20 Ibid.
21 Schmidt, 2000, p. 82.
22 Groups such as World ITC seek and claim to document and record instances of communications with spirit
realms through technological means, using tape recorder, TVs, radios, computers, telephones, and other
technical devices with the intent to get meaningful information from beyond in such forms as voices,
images, and text. See http://worlditc.org/.
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pursue this was through technological progress. He believed that when repetitive and slow
tasks are replaced with machines, the mind's operations have the freedom to speed up,
resulting in further development and intellectual progress. Technology was, for Edison,
something to be put to the uses not merely as a profit generator for the sake of profit, nor
mainly in the service of entertainment and leisure, but most particularly as a means of
advancing education and the speed of thinking, in order to enable further discovery and
growth. He viewed the promise of, for example, the motion picture as primarily educational;
not in content necessarily, but in its potential to train the mind and the memory to function
more rapidly and more efficiently by its unique method of presenting its message. He was
certain that he had already observed such an effect on society as a whole to a marked
degree.23 Economic growth, the growth of human knowledge, and the betterment of the
human condition were inextricably interwoven in his view.
Despite his practical, tactical approach to choosing which projects to pursue, he
expressed the sharpest disdain for confidence men and frauds, snake-oil salesmen who made
money by cheating the public. No, his aim was not just to make money. Though he never
spoke of 'service to humanity' he was unshakeable in a kind of idealism Commercial
demand was his measure of need. By giving, or rather selling, to the world what it needs and
demands, all nations of the earth would long remember him with gratitude and honor him
The fiery passion of his life was to earn permanent fame.24
THE DIARIES & SUNDRY OBSERVATIONS: CHANGING THE STORY
While Edison expressed an aversion to autobiography, he kept diaries and notebooks,
both technical and personal. Some of his personal notes were gathered together into a
volume released under the title The Diaries and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva
Edison.
The first section of the book, the Diaries, contains a handful of entries from the 1870s,
and the rest, the Sundry Observations, is composed of various essays dated from throughout
the 1920s when he was in his seventies and eighties. The essays' topics cover a wide range:
education, the history of his inventions, musings about the place of his deafness in his
scientific process, political philosophy, economic theory, copyright protection, and his
intelligence test for prospective employees, among others.25 The penultimate chapter is
23 Edison, 1948, p. 79.
24 Rosanoff, Martin Andr. Harper's Monthly, September 1932. Edison in his laboratory, p 414415.
http://harpers.org/archive/1932/09/edison-in-his-laboratory/
25 The Sundry Observations section of the book (taking up 200 of the 238 pages) is less well documented than
one might wish. Some of the essays were written for publication in various magazines, but only the date of
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titled For a Better World, and is mainly a discussion of the political and economic issues
facing Europe and the United States in the era following the first World War. The final
chapter is titled The Realms Beyond, and describes Edison's singular views on the nature of
life, death, personality, and communications with spirits (on which I will elaborate below).
The history of this book is a curious one. It was released in 1948, seventeen years after
his death, by the Philosophical Library. But it was quickly re-issued in the same year, in a
shortened version. The two final chapters, totaling sixty-three pages, had been removed,
along with the index in its entirety. The inference easily drawn is that the first of these was
considered politically controversial, and the second embarrassingly unscientific. Perhaps his
family asked that the chapters be removed, with the intent of maintaining his public image
as a strictly empirically-oriented objectivist.
EDISON ON RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY, & SPIRITUALISM
Edison's ideas on the materiality of the human spirit were a part of a continuum of
thought that goes back to the classical world. His articulation of his own particular position
on the difficult spirit-matter binary restates the problem in light of the scientific and
secularizing modernity in which he lived. He articulated a perception of life and death as
disparate realms of being, common and natural in the course of human existence. Both states
depend, in his view, upon an organization of energy that could be called soul, spirit, or
personality; that which makes a person the particular human they are. He believed that this
soul could persist beyond the dis-organization of its associated bodily entity. Put another
way, Edison believed that the soul could survive the death of the body, although it was not
necessarily immortal.
It is important to note that Edison, at least in print, confined his plans for his new
apparatus to the spirits, or persistent personalities as he termed it, of dead people, and not
any other kind of spirit that mediums or other spiritual practitioners might aim or claim to be
in communication with. His understanding of spirits and of the means by which they might
communicate were limited by specific philosophical understandings, and by his lifelong
habit of empirical methods of inquiry and process.
In the Autumn of 1920, when Edison made his announcement, his more prolific days of
invention were past. But he continued to work, explore, experiment, and run his companies.
He was at this time, in other words, publicly seen as in command of his faculties and not
suffering from any decline in reason, age-related or otherwise. The public response to this
their writing is given, and there is no indication of the occasion and intended audience for each piece, nor
whether or where these observations were published.
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news was chaotic and intense. To some, it seemed that the scientist had taken leave of his
senses and fallen in with the Spiritualist camp among the mediums and seance-sitters. To
others, it seemed that long-held hopes for such a conduit to other worlds were about to
receive the imprimatur of scientific veracity, and to become a reality.
Edison was indifferent to organized forms of religion, and wrote in his diary on July 12,
1885, My conscience seems to be oblivious of Sundays. It must be incrusted with a sort of
irreligious tartr [sic].26 And he was publicly skeptical, even derisive, of Spiritualism. He
was high-handedly dismissive of spiritualist claims that non-corporeal beings, or spirits,
could be summoned by the living. But he was curious about the possibility that
communication with the dead could happen, and became involved in Theosophy, attending
Madame Blavatsky's gatherings in New York City often enough to receive a certificate of
membership.27 He later repudiated the group, and went so far as to deny having ever been
involved with it. Still, his distinctly individual ideas on human nature and what could be
termed the soul owed much to his introduction, via Theosophy, to the concept of
reincarnation.
In his diaries, he describes his view of the nature of life. He believed the mysterious life
force to be, like matter and energy, un-creatable, indestructible, and eternal. He conjectured
that life had an elemental nature, like matter, and was material in form. Like the material
bodies of living beings , their life-force was, he speculated, made of tiny particles: what he
termed life-entities, analogous to atoms. The universe's supply of life was fixed. Like the
elements, it could be shaped, combined, and recombined into different compounds and
different life-forms, but in his view there was a fixed amount of life in the world.
What are commonly thought of as individual life-formshuman beings, or other fauna,
and floraare in Edison's philosophy not themselves discrete units, but rather
agglomerations of infinitesimally small life-entities. In both the Scientific American
article28 that followed his 1920 announcement, and in a collection of essays, Edison stressed
that he was not taking a position on the question of whether the personality (he never speaks
of the soul) survives the death of the body. Rather, he wrote that he hoped to put a scientific
instrument into the service of the scientific inquiry into this question, as well as into the
hands of the non-scientist for experimentation. If the personality survives the death of the
body, that is to say, if the life-entities maintain their structure as an organized group or, as he
put it, as a swarm, after they leave the body and enter into a new realm or existence,
26 Edison, 1948, p 8.
27 Conot, Robert, 1979 p. 427.
28 Lescarboura, Austin C. Scientific American October 30, 1920. Edison's Views on Life and Death: An
Interview with the Famous Inventor Regarding His Attempt to Communicate with the Next World.
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then he believed that the apparatus he was planning would be sensitive enough to pick up
any communications with the living human realm that such personalities might endeavor to
make. This is a subtle but important distinction: He did not believe that they could be
conjured or summoned by mediums; they could only be presented with an avenue through
which they might communicate if they wished to do so. He mentions that he had an
experimental partner who died shortly before the interview with Scientific American took
place, and states confidently that this person ought to be the first to make use of the
apparatus if it should work.
Edison's view of the life entities was a distinctive form of homunculus philosophy, one
which reflects his view of the nature of the human social world. This world-view
particularly reflected his views on business, which he put at the heart of the purpose and
good of the world. He saw in the human personality not one little person running things
from within the human being, but a sort of factory, complete with a workforce and a
hierarchy of workers and managers. As with human businesses, about five percent of the
life-entities are managers or directors which make the decisions, while the rest are
workers that execute the various tasks needed for the functioning of the living being while
it is alive in this realm or existence. Each life-task was attended to by a swarm of lifeentities; they cooperated in a kind of super-swarm to form the whole personality. In his
conjectures on what happens to the personality after death, he is, not surprisingly, most
concerned with the managers, the brains of the operation. Like a shop that manufactures
inventions, such as his own industrial research laboratory in Menlo Park, the staff of the
personality can be replaced but the creatives and executives at the helm cannot.29
Edison vaguely associates his theories with electron theory, giving a quasi-scientific
basis to the assertion that some billions of sentient entities form the undetectable matter and
structure of life and consciousness, but he neither elaborates electron theory for the
edification of his readers, nor explains in what way exactly an electron is analogous to a
sentient life-entity. Nor does he articulate just how an infinitesimally small, irreducible
unit can be so complex as to possess consciousness.
Edison was almost entirely self-taught, through both reading and meticulously controlled
experimentation. (In his typical hyperbolic style, he often claimed never to have attended a
day of school in his life, but as with much of his later reconstruction of his life and career,
29 Certainly he would not have seen his Menlo Park employees as being very easily replaceable. His
development of the questionnaire system for identifying promising workers (and especially managers), and
his very vocal defense of this system under strong criticism, demonstrate that he did not see his employees
as drones, a dime a dozen and easily swapped in and out like parts in a machine. They could be replaced,
though it might require effort from the higher-ups.
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this was an exaggeration designed for dramatic effectwhich he held to be more important
than factual accuracy.) He read extensively, and his interests were quite catholic; his library,
preserved at the Edison National Historical Site, contains upwards of 10,000 volumes, and
includes modern literature, physicists, poetry, and philosophy. His opinions on most things
depended on the demonstrability of the theories, arguments, and explanations that were
available. His views on religious issues were also continually changing, developing as his
experience increased the information available to shape them. Yet although he clothed his
views on religion in the language of reason and science, they were highly speculative and
subjective. An interesting note on mortality and the survival of personality after bodily
death, terse though it may be, can be found in his diary entry for July 12, 1885, where he
quotes appreciatively a line from Hawthorne's English Note Book one of two fine things
he found in the book: Ghostland [lies] beyond the jurisdiction of veracity. He makes no
further comment on this declaration, but his approval would appear to constitute a rare
admission to being without certainty on a matter he finds to be of interest.30 Somewhere
during the following thirty-five years, he seems to have decided to bring Ghostland under
that jurisdiction.
A section of the Diary and Sundry Observations is devoted to a strong endorsement of
Thomas Paine's philosophy. One diary entry laments that many people
carry the idea that a large portion of the Creator's time was
specifically devoted to hearing requests, criticism, and complaints about
the imperfection of the natural laws which regulate this mud ball. What a
wonderfully small idea mankind has of the almighty! Why can't man
practice the teachings of his own conscience, and not obtrude his
purposely created mind in affairs that will be attended to without any
volunteer advice?
Schmidt, in Hearing Things, evokes Paine as the exemplar of his age's trend in
theological thinking on the voice of God. In an age of growing mechanization, in which the
world was increasingly understood in terms of the workings of natural laws and
measurements,
The very idea of a God who speaks and listens, a proposition integral to
Christian devotionalism, became a 'monstrous belief' to men like Paine,
and the voice of reason was offered as a mechanically reliable replacement
for these divine attributes. Paine concluded with characteristic
bluntness: 'I totally disbelieve that the Almighty ever did communicate

30 Edison, 1948, p. 5.
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anything to man, by any mode of speech, in any language, or by any kind

of vision.31
Paine seems a most fitting philosophical model for Edison, a man devoted to discovery
and invention in the material world. Edison's view of a purposeful but distant and
disinterested God was very much the legacy of Paine and the American Enlightenment's
Deism. And Edison's research into a possible mechanistic description of the human essence,
the personality or soul, is in accord with this understanding.
Edison made a few earlier statements regarding religion and his philosophy of the
personality, but the most concentrated material is to be found in (this article was introduced
already) the interviews and articles that followed the 1920 announcement, along with a few
of the essays and talks found in the original edition of the Diary and Sundry Observations
Austin C. Lescarboura wrote in Scientific American about the announcement:
Immediately the press of the United States and Europe announced that
Thomas A. Edison had joined the ranks of the spiritists, which now
number many a prominent scientist, author, inventor, physicist, engineer,
clergyman, and so on. Soon the highly imaginative French writers drew
pen pictures of Mr. Edison's apparatus serving as a telephone station or
telegraph office or whatnot, where persons wishing to communicate with
those who have passed on could do so in a positive and prompt manner.
And no one is more sorry than Mr. Edison that this impression has been
permitted to gain ground both here and abroad. 'In the first place, I cannot
conceive such a thing as a spirit,' said Mr. Edison to the writer. He meant
it, too. 'Imagine something which has no weight, no material form, no
mass; in a word, imagine nothing! I cannot be a party to the belief that
spirits exist and can be seen under certain circumstances and can be made
to tilt tables and rap and do other things of a similar unimportant nature.
The whole thing is so absurd.'
In fact, it was mainly for the reason of correcting the impression about Mr.
Edison's activities in this latest field of research that the inventor granted
the writer an interview.
To Edison, a non-material spirit was an impossibility. But a life-force, consisting of
material particles, was another matter. There may not have been techniques to measure and
demonstrate those particlesyetbut he intended to develop those techniques . Like
telegraphy, electricity, radio and sound waves, he seems to have been implying, the
apparently intangible could be made tangible in this context as well.
31 Schmidt, Hearing Things, p. 6.
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Edison's dislike of the popular name Spirit Phone was due to a feeling that it
misrepresented his experiments, his intentions, and his philosophy. One of Edison's main
points in granting this interview was to clarify that his apparatus was not to be a phone on
which the living could call up the dead at will. The initiating force in the use of the
apparatus would be the surviving personality of the dead, and not a living human. He was
interested in constructing an apparatus that the dead could use as a sort of valve; as an
amplifier of energy that could be activated by the surviving personality with the smallest of
exertion: Since the actual mass of the life-entities was infinitesimal, the personality they
formed, and the force it was capable of exerting, were likewise extremely small. A great
amplification of this force would be necessary for the disembodied personality to make its
efforts apparent on the gross level of the living human. It is similar to a modern power
house, where man, with his relatively puny one-eighth horse-power, turns a valve which
starts a 50,000-horse-power steam turbine. My apparatus is along those lines It was to be
a nearly open conduit, easy for the disembodied personality, with its infinitesimal mass, to
operate.
At one point he relates in his essays, We tried some experiments in mind reading which
were not very successful. Think mind reading contrary to common sense, wise provision of
the Bon Dieu that we cannot read each others' minds. 'Twould stop civilization and
everybody would take to the woods. In fifty or a hundred thousand centuries, when mankind
has become perfect by evolution, then perhaps this sense could be developed with safety to
the state.32 That's an interesting comment. Edison appears to have taken for granted both the
workings of evolution and those of a sentient and intentional deity. He also clearly takes a
teleological view of nature, as illustrated or exemplified by evolution, with the end and goal
being the perfection of man. Later, he describes a photograph of a very beautiful girl, and
says that if a fly looks at it, then the insectivorous branch of nature [will] gaze upon a
picture of what they will attain after ages of evolution.33
Regarding the survival of the life-entities after the death of the body, he wrote: The
group of entities which make up a normal man's intelligence seek release from, rather
than prolongation of, existence in the conditions and environments of this cycle [of the
normal human lifespan] so that they may enter another, whatever it may be.34 Human
beings seek constant change and challenge; once the opportunities for this are exhausted in
the human life-span, they must turn for change to whatever may come beyond.35 Some
32
33
34
35

Edison, 1948, p 20. Diary entry for July 16, 1885.

Edison, 1948, p 21.
Edison, 1948, p. 179180.
Ibid.

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time after a person reaches the age of sixty, though perhaps not until age ninety or so, he
writes: The cycle [of human life] is approaching the end. At about that age the entities
which form that man will be preparing to discard their old abode, which is that man, and
enter upon a new cycle.36 He does not conclude here whether the entities remain in the
same swarm that formed the particular personality whose body is being discarded;
presumably some do and are reborn in a new body, and some disperse and reform to make
new personalities.
On his eightieth birthday, Edison was still discussing his philosophy and conjecturing on
the persistence of personality. In an interview with the Washington Post,37 he is quoted: The
word God has no meaning to me. But I do believe that there is a supreme intelligence
pervading the universe, and at times I believe that when a man dies the swarms of billions of
highly organized entities which live in the cells, desert the body, go out into space, keep on,
and enter another and last cycle. Man is not the unit of life. Man is as dead as granite. The
unit of life consists of these highly organized entities. This reference to a last cycle is an
interesting development of his beliefs; it seems different from his earlier position, that the
life-entities are immortal, like mass and energy, changeable not in form but only in how they
are organized into swarms. This seems to indicate a notion of evolution of these entities,
separate from the evolution of the bodies in which they reside during their earthly sojourns.
In this interview, unfortunately Edison did not discuss whether he was still working on
developing the apparatus.
CONCLUSION
The history of Edison's apparatus provides an occasion for posing and exploring some
intriguing questions about the ways in which we imagine our powers of creativity,
manipulation and interaction with unpredictable realities, and how these understandings
assist in forming our self-understandings as well.
People of our era increasingly sees the progress of humanity as involving the sloughing
off of superstitions, of the irrational, and of any appeal to the supernatural for either
explanation or articulation of human experience. The notion that this is an intrinsic element
of the progression of the scientific post-modern world, essential to the development of a
more educated, objective, rational, accurate perception and portrayal of reality is one I wish
to trouble. We may have been missing something valuable in adopting this course. Or
36 Ibid.
37 Thomas Edison, 80, Puts in Busy Day Detailing Views. (1927, Feb 12). The Washington Post (1923-1954).
Retrieved from http://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/149800305?
accountid=10226
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perhaps it is not that we have been missing something that would be valuable to the mindset
we cherish and chase; perhaps that goal is itself missing something of value that we have
discounted. Perhaps there are other elements of our existence that will not be left out; that
irrupt out of our unconscious, through our beliefs and practices, and into unsettling
experiences. Alternatively, these elements may show themselves in more nuanced ways,
through subtle influences on our interpretations and receptions of the world and changes in it
as they occur.
Edison came out of, and acted within, an era of both increasing technological progress,
and increasing belief that all phenomena could be explained by a materialist, scientistic
approach. This era also, however, retained an enchanted view of the worldthe popular
perception had, in a way, simply transferred its perceived source of enchantment from the
unseen and unknowable, reinvesting this enchantment in the unseen but knowable and
achievable. Human ingenuity and its products became an almost-magical source of
understanding and transformation.
The uncomprehending and unquestioning acceptance of greater and greater marvels of
technological innovation is even more prevalent today than it was in Edison's era. The
average American of the early twenty-first century expects to have at their disposal a vast
array of goods and technologies; they do not expect to comprehend the principles that
govern the functioning and construction of these goods and technologies, nor what it would
be like to live without them. We have multiplied the number of black boxes, the
incomprehensible apparatuses that do wonders, in our lives. Yet in doing so, we have taken
the concept further and into a new dimension: We have lost the sense of wonder that these
used to produce; the marvelous has become the quotidian: an expected element of daily life,
and has thus lost its character as a source of marvel and of enchantment.
One of the most striking differences between Edison's age and ours is that the
perceptions of at least some portion of the general populace did not respect a strict boundary
between what we now think of as the scientific and spiritual; this included inventors
themselves. The unknown was seemingly vast and undifferentiated between what might be
brought into the known and what might not. In his ongoing experiments with radio waves in
1920, Marconi received signals whose source he could not ascertain. He speculated that they
may have come from space, and perhaps that they indicated a deliberate attempt to
communicate. Some people thought that he was investigating the existence of intelligent
extraterrestrial life, but these investigations of interstellar radio waves have proven useful to
contemporary astronomical research. The unseen forces that the vast majority of the
populace saw as occult were fair game for the inventors of telegraphy, radio, x-ray and the
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spirit-phone. And the inventions themselves were often seen as occult manifestations, either
marvelous or demonicuntil the public became used to them.
The general openness to his opinions was quite different from what we might expect to
find if a respected scientist or industrialist were to offer such observations and opinions
today. We now draw brighter lines around unapproachable questions, and disdain to dignify
them with consideration, let alone investigation. The extensive coverage given by the
mainstream popular press to Edison's musings about spiritual questions when addressed as
technological problems to be investigated would be unthinkable today. The articles
published about Edison and his announcement, with titles such as Edison at Work on Spirit
Device, Edison Works on Device by Which Living May be Able to Talk With Dead,
Edison Seeks Electric Path to Spirit World would these days be more likely be seen in the
National Enquirer than in Scientific American and The New York Times. While I would not
advocate that some communications company announce that their next killer app will be
iPhone for Ghosts, the prejudged clear division between what is realistic and what is not,
what is achievable and what is not, tends to put a limit on what we imagine and what we
attempt. It also tends to cast the latest marvel in the light of inevitability. The sense of
wonder and awe is a casualty when our certainty of the wall between the scientific and the
spiritual is fortified, with rational man inside, and the spiritual cast outside the walls.
Gerald Fabris,38 writing about Edison and his times, put the contrast between that era and
ours this way: Technologically, more is possible today. But, ironically, less is imaginable.
Somehow the boundaries of what is real have become, in our imaginary, coextensive with
the boundaries of the empirically reproducible. For many, what has not been reproduced by
empirical experimentation and thus proven scientifically is not real at all. This seems,
somewhat ironically, to be more true among laymen than among scientists. It seems that
there is no end to ingenuity and progress of knowledge, and scientific advances are no less
impressive in our day, yet something seems to be missing. Ultimately, Edison's apparatus for
talking with the dead was not realized. But that does not necessarily mean it was a failure in
all respects. Perhaps it is possible to see Edison's investigation of this unlikely apparatus not
merely as a quaint and quirky dream of an aging scientist, but instead as an example of the
importance of keeping our questions and our minds open, of being willing to explore ideas
that may appear far-fetched and unscientific. Preposterous ideas have been known to yield
paradigm-changing results.

38 Fabris 1998, p.19.

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Kellogg

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Edison's Own Secret Spirit Experiments

Weighing a spirit.

Modern Mechanix and Inventions magazine published, in 1933, a purported account

of a 1920 experiment conducted by Edison and his colleagues. That experiment
supposedly attempted to catch a spirit in a trap that would measure when its
sensors had been activated by the mass of the spirit. The illustration is intended to
show that Edison's theory of spirits as physical entities entailed a measurable mass,
weight, color, and other traits of physical bodies. The illustration took even more
liberties with Edison's ideas than did the article.

Timeline of some important events and inventions

1826

Photography invented by Joseph Nicephore Niepce

1835

Morse code invented by Samuel Morse

1838

Electro-magnetic telegraph invented by Charles Wheatstone, and also by

Samuel Morse

1848

Fox sisters first report of communications with spirits

1861 to
1865

American Civil War

1876

Telephone invented by Alexander Graham Bell (and Elisha Gray, but the
U.S. Patent Office gave the credit and the patent to Bell).

1877

Phonograph invented by Thomas Alva Edison

1880

Photophone invented by Alexander Graham Bell. Forerunner of fiber-optics,

the technology of the day did not permit its development into a useful form
until many decades later.

1891

Motion picture Kinetoscope developed by Edison

1893

Wireless communication invented by Nikola Tesla

1895

Radio signals invented by Guglielmo Marconi

1896

Motion picture projection

1907

Color photography was invented by Auguste and Louis Lumire

Radio amplifier was invented by Lee DeForest

1920

Marconi speculates that signals he has received have arrived from space

1920

Edison announces the apparatus for speaking with the dead

1923

Sound film invented by Lee DeForest

Television Electronic invented by Philo Farnsworth

WORKS CITED
Billings, Molly. June, 1997 modified RDS February, 2005. The Influenza Pandemic of 1918.
http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/
Conot, Robert. Streak of Luck. 1979. New York: Seaview Books. Chapter 39: The Freethinker.
Cox, S.S., The Poetry of the Phonograph: Its Marvelous Feats and Capabilities -- Its Humors
and Solemnities. The Post and Union Newspaper, Washington, D.C., April 24, 1878.
Phonozoic Text Archive, Document 134 http://www.phonozoic.net/n0134.htm, accessed
May 3, 2013.
Douglas, Susan J. Inventing American broadcasting, 1899-1922. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1989.
Edison, Thomas Alva. The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison. Dagobert D.
Runes, ed. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948.

Edison's Own Secret Sprit Experiments. Modern Mechanix and Inventions, October, 1933.
Accessed at http://blog.modernmechanix.com/edisons-own-secret-spiritexperiments/
Explaining the phonograph. (1878, Jun 26). The Daily Constitution (1876-1881). Retrieved
from http://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?
url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/494690707?accountid=10226
Fabris, Gerard, 1998. Mr. Edison's Machine to Talk with the Dead: Spiritualism, Technology
and Imagination in the Post-World War I United States. Unpublished paper, Columbia
University.
Lescarboura, Austin C. Edison's Views on Life and Death: An Interview with the Famous
Inventor Regarding his Attempt to Communicate with the Next World. Scientific
American, October 30, 1920, Volume 123 No 18 pp 441-460 p. 446, 458460.
New-York Tribune. (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, February 12, 1920, Page 8 Image 8. Edison
at 73 is the Center of Reunion. Image and text provided by Library of Congress,
Washington, DC. Persistent link:
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1920-02-12/ed-1/seq-8/
Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Thomas Edison, 80, Puts in Busy Day Detailing Views. (1927, Feb 12). The Washington Post
(1923-1954). Retrieved from http://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?
url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/149800305?accountid=10226
Wright, Gwendolyn: HISTORY DETECTIVES: The Psychophone Season 7, Episode 1 Aired:
06/22/2009. http://video.pbs.org/video/1143720703/